#######################################################
## 			REPLICATION MATERIAL 
## 
## 		"Do Authoritarian Elections Help the Poor? 
##          		Evidence from Russian Cities"
##
##
##				 by 				 			 	  
##		Quintin H. Beazer & Ora John Reuter
##
##				in							 	  
## 			The Journal of Politics		 	  
##													 	  
#######################################################

This readme.txt file details all the materials provided here to reproduce numerical results from the tables and figures in both the article's main body and in the appendix.  

To ask questions or report a suspected error, please contact the authors. We are happy to correspond with others about the project. Send emails to: Quintin Beazer (qbeazer@fsu.edu) or John Reuter (reutero@uwm.edu)  



## DATA FILES
#############

Main data file: "zhilJOP.dta"
	- Dataset of mayoral selection status and condition of housing stock at the city-level
	- unit of observation: city-year 
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from:
		- the main text (Tables 1-5)
		- the appendix (A1-A13).
	- Saved in Stata 12 format
	
Auxiliary data file: "HH_1994_2015_v1.dta"
	- Survey data of Russian households (1994-20050), from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS)
	- unit of observation: household-year
	- Use this file to replicate statistical results from:
		- the main text (Figure 1)
		- the appendix (A4).
	- may need to be merged with main dataset using auxiliary .do file
	- Saved in Stata 12 format



## SCRIPTS & REPLICATION CODE
#############################

The replication materials contain 4 Stata .do files and 1 .R script:

1.) "BeazerReuterHousingTables.do" 		-- .do file for the results in the main text
2.) "BeazerReuterHousingAppendix.do" 	-- .do file for the results in the appendix
3.) "BeazerReuterRLMS2009dotplot.do" 	-- .do file creates small dataset of survey responses for Fig 1
4.) "RLMSmerge.do" 						-- .do file merges city-level data with RLMS response for analyses in Table A4
5.) "BeazerReuterHousingPlots.R"		-- R script to recreate plots from main text (Fig. 1 & 2) and conduct sensitivity analysis in Table A14

Each file contains a short preamble detailing exactly which tables and figures are associated with that particular file.  

At the beginning of each file, there is a line of code for users to set the working directory to the location where these replication files have been downloaded.  To ensure that the code runs smoothly, users should replace the placeholders ("XXXXX") with the appropriate file path.  Within each file, we have tried to add clarifying comments alongside the replication code to make the data manipulation and analyses transparent.  

